I grew quickly twittery this morning when I read that particle physicists have successfully demonstrated the plausibility of communication with applied quantum entanglement. Over-simply put, the scientists "entangled" two blue photons, separated them, exposed one of them to a yellow photon, and the other photon reacted, over a distance of about 100 meters. This idea stokes my imagination -- that entangled particles communicate with each other instantaneously, no matter how far they are separated -- even be it by galaxies -- which means information can travel faster than the speed of light! So later this morning, I put on my old running shoes, demoted to lawn mowing shoes, and fired up the grass cutting machine. While I am purring around the yard I am pondering how to use ideas from quantum mechanics and Einstein's other theories in sermons. My thoughts move from a possible explanation of voodoo dolls, telepathy, and emotional entanglement of identical twins to the theory that gravity is not really just an attractive force but a beautiful, graceful bending of the structure of space time by massive objects. And that this has practical application, because our GPS devices which tell us where we are would not work unless the satellites in synchronous orbit above the earth have been set there with mathematics that take the influence of the earth's mass on space/time into account (otherwise they would drift, if purely Newtonian laws of physics were considered, and we would be forever arriving at the wrong address, which may explain those glitches with Googlemaps). I wondered how I would illustrate this, and remembered playing with my baby son on the floor of our home, an farm old house whose weak foundations, exposed for years to the influence of the earth's mass, settled and so set the floors out of level -- so that when I rolled a ball to my son, it travelled in an arc across the linoleum rather than in a straight line. After an hour of cogitating and collecting leaves and grass in the mower bag, I put the labor down, picked up the latest Smithsonian magazine which arrived in the mail earlier today, which I had not yet opened, and went out to my office at McDonalds for a fish sandwich and a read. I settled down across from my french fries and opened the magazine, to find an article all about Einstein's arduous but successful arrival at a General Theory of Relativity, including an interesting exposition on the challenges of comprehending gravity as a function of mass affecting the structure of space/time. How to explain this? The illustration concerned not a floor, but a table top, which I was asked to imagine had been warped in some fashion so that a marble rolled across its surface would travel not in a straight line, but an arc . . . So perhaps you've been thinking about this, today, as well, eh? http://www.technologyreview.com/view/520886/japanese-telco-smashes-entanglement-distance-record/